untitled (man)

1990
oil on canvas, 81 x 110 cm
Destroyed by fire.


I painted this during the foundation art course at the former West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, and it formed part of my year end exhibition. A few years later it decorated the flat of bass player of The Sons Of Dark Horses, Webster, in Laleham for a year or two. It was a very creative flat with a constant to-ing and fro-ing of musicians and singers.

I painted at a time when I was learning about paints, looking at lots of paintings and making friends with the question "what am I doing?" In this painting I'm playing with colour contrasts, enjoying the visual play of complementary colours, and introducing thin layers which allow the layers beneath to enter a mysterious shadowy world.

I held onto a need to have a figurative element, to tell some kind of story, and here it is the form of a person perhaps falling backwards, perhaps depicting the idea of letting oneself go, of trusting in the colours and the paint. Maybe once the figure has fallen through the image the colours left on the canvas will tell their own story.